Introduction:
Recognizing the difficulty of breaking into the household robotics business, Amazon Brings its Home Robot to Businesses a much more corporate market with its Astro robot.
Today, the company unveiled Astro for Business, a version of Astro designed to serve as a security robot for small and medium-sized business clients. With the addition of Astro for Business, users may configure numerous security monitoring routes and set up alerts for when the robot detects sounds such as glass breaking or carbon monoxide and smoke alarms.
Conventional security solutions may not meet the needs of businesses because they are too costly or static. Anthony Robson, the head of product for Amazon Astro, stated in a prepared statement, “We think Astro for Business can help with that.”
Amazon Brings its Home Robot to Businesses:
Amazon Brings its Home Robot to Businesses [Source of Image: Techcrunch.com]
At $2,349.99, Astro for Business isn’t inexpensive, especially when you consider that you’ll need to subscribe to additional plans to utilize the service entirely.
Astro for Business clients must pay $20 monthly for Ring Protect Pro to save video history and sync Astro with Ring alarms and motion detectors. Astro’s patrolling and alerting capabilities, dubbed Astro Secure, are not free; they cost $60 a month on their own. Ring Protect Pro and Astro Secure subscriptions are required for the $99 monthly human agent service and monitoring cost.
A four-month trial of Ring Protect Pro and Astro Secure is included with Astro for Business, which is initially only accessible in the United States, but the prices will pile up.
Astro for Business, which is incredibly expensive, is an attempt by Amazon to wring as much value as possible out of Astro, which was noticeably missing from the company’s annual showcase of products and services this year. Approximately two years after its launch, Astro is still an invite-only product, and Ken Washington, Amazon’s vice president of consumer robotics, has just left the company.
My colleague Haje stated in an opinion piece that “Even Amazon can’t quite figure out what Astro is for.” Yes, in fact.
